"Your hot take in the hot takes thread is just being a contrarian. The real answers are (ice-cold default takes and rankings from casual smogon)" is kind of frustrating. I'll admit it's more novel and interesting from someone who isn't in the average smogon age range. But overall we've heard this before. Also, like, megas and overall gen ratings, aren't super relevant to BW's
story in particular. The group that dislikes BW's story – me included – tends to view it like this: while BW's story looks good at first blush to many people, and has some things it does well, the story gets worse when you examine it harder and more thoroughly.
For additional perspective, here is one common critiques about BW's story. There are others (vagueness about truth and ideals, flat-character Ghetsis, kissing up to the player), but this is probably the most fundamental.
*This is only about BW1, not B2W2, to be clear, because that's all DR talked about. I'm not considering or acknowledging anything about B2W2.
The Team Plasma Motivations Critique
Background
Through Team Plasma, the game introduces an interesting idea. What if the status quo of Pokemon – how the player, player character, and other friendly characters treat Pokemon – is wrong?
Normally, we as players, and Game Freak too, don't think too hard the ethics of how we treat Pokemon in the games. We have ideas about friendship and bonding, and there are little excuses and pretenses for things like captures and battles, but we don't really think hard about whether we're justified in capturing Pokemon, holding onto them, and using them to battle.
And that is okay. Not every game needs to pull out the microscope to examine its own in-universe ethical foundations. We can say that some Pokemon are intelligent, sapient creatures, and we can still stuff them in balls, abandon them in PC slots, or trade them away as if they're unfeeling property. That hypocrisy isn't a big deal because it's a video game. We're here to have fun, and the Pokemon aren't real, so it's not a big deal if people do things that would hurt their feelings, if they had been real.
What BW Does and Doesn't Do
However, BW
seems like it isn't satisfied with this casual hypocrisy. The hypocrisy didn't require an answer, but GF going out of their way to address it, to challenge their past worlds and ethics, to think harder about their worldbuilding and maybe even create a new society with stronger foundation, is really interesting. Team Plasma and N ask, if Pokemon are these sapient creatures whose feelings and thoughts we care about, shouldn't they be allowed to make their own choices?. It seems plausible. If a Pokemon is as smart as humans, shouldn't we ask them if they want to battle with us instead of taking them as a given? If they are as smart as animals, can they reasonably consent to these painful battles?
This idea naturally leads into a really powerful message. We as players / player characters, and other good and friendly characters, didn't think at all about how we mistreated and abused these members of society. We assumed the status quo was fine because, well, everyone said it was, and we loved our subservient little pets/human equivalents/whatever. However, relations are not fine actually! We need to rise up and challenge the status quo to make a fair society for everyone, where Pokemon are treated with respect and dignity. It's especially powerful because Game Freak is swallowing the hard pill of critiquing themselves here and their past work, overturning their own status quo of game worlds, making the message a lot more powerful. Similarly, they're forcing the player to actually question their past and present actions, which takes courage.
However, even though the game raised this idea, it's not very interested in actually thinking through it further, or providing a worthwhile answer to the question. Turns out the people who brought up this interesting and valid ethical question, who challenged Game Freak's methodology, are actually... evil guys!! Yeah! And their poor, deluded flunkies who were misled into believing the group cared about anything. And then... because Team Plasma is actually evil... we don't need to treat their legitimate ethical question seriously! The status quo is fine! Trust us! Now you need to save that status quo from these evil guys!
A Note on N
The primary challenge to my above critique, where I say GF is not interested in thinking through, answering, or validating its Pokemon ethical dilemma, is N. N is a beloved character who believes and says many pro-Plasma things, seemingly giving credibility to the dilemma and fleshing him out. Does he actually do these things?
Not... really?
First, he believes Team Plasma points in the first place because he was a poor, deluded flunky. He arrived at the position that Pokemon are mistreated because a pure evil person deceived him into believing this. Through Ghetsis's manipulation, we are shown direct examples of Pokemon being mistreated by humans, proving that it
can happen, but this isn't new to BW. Lots of Pokemon villains mistreat Pokemon across previous games. I guess you could say that, since these Pokemon weren't mistreated by dedicated Villain Teams ™, the game could be subtly implying that Pokemon mistreatment is less of an exception to the norm done by dedicated evil villains, casting some doubt on the status quo, but I think that is stretching a bit far.
As the game goes on, he increasingly questions this Team Plasma position, increasingly drifting towards the status-quo position that Pokemon-human interaction is broadly good and shouldn't be destroyed. To the game's credit, he does not entirely abandon it and go all-in on the status quo. After his final defeat, he says that both you and him could be correct, which like, yeah, sure, that is true enough. There are some valuable things and awful things about the Pokemon-human status quo. However, if one claims that "The game uses N to seriously interrogate the status quo", the chosen method of "drifting away from propaganda to a 50/50 position, with potentially more shifting towards the status quo later" is a very unconvincing and wishy-washy way to send that message. In other words, even the most credible challenge to the status quo ends up going "Player, agent of the status quo, you might be right alongside me." And then he's gone.
Fundamentally, the people who mistreated Pokemon for N to receive, they are treated as aberrant exceptions. The Pokemon-human status quo is broadly depicted as good, despite having some exceptions. Its primary agent – you, the player – beats the other side into submission, enforcing a fundamentally unchanged status quo on the world. Indeed, this unchallenged reality is what we see in future Pokemon games. I don't know how the game's primary viewpoint on the status quo can be anything other than supportive, and that's the best information we get to answering the dilemma.
Final Thoughts
As I said before, Game Freak didn't need to address this hypocritical status quo situation. But bringing it up, just to
actively refuse to give it a good answer, going
out of their way to build up a status quo player as good and victorious, is one hell of a cop-out. They ignore the powerful implicit message to improve the status quo. Did they bring this dilemma up so people would think "Wow, we're dealing with serious issues!! Cool!!" until they slowly realize, surprise, GF isn't going to deal with this issue beyond the shallowest surface level? Is it a lame defense against the tiny minority that complains about Pokemon ethics, to say "actually we made you into the evil dictator wojack, and even your husbando is turning toward our side"? I don't know. In the end, the Pokemon ethics stuff is mostly a waste of time, a replaceable filler excuse for the Evil Guys to once again do their Evil Guy routine.
Shaun has a
great video on Harry Potter that talks about how works of fiction can deal with potential societal inequality. One especially great part starts around 1:19:00. Here, he talks about another story where the protagonist initially accepts an unequal status quo. I'm going to contrast that story with BW.
In Terry Pratchett's (Discworld)
Snuff, goblins are sapient but treated as inferiors in society. They internalize this status, such that they don't resist when people kidnap them to do manual labor. The protagonist, basically a police chief, even visits a pub called the "Goblin's Head" which has an
actual stuffed goblin head mounted on the wall. Pretty fucked up.
If this story was told like BW, the villain would take this atrocity as an excuse to do other atrocities. The protagonist would stop the villain, and then the world would return to normal... including the general societal inferiority of the goblins.
In
Snuff, the protagonists originally doesn't think much about the pub, because goblin inferiority is normalized. But after he spends some time with goblins, he grows to understand them as sapient creatures that should be equal with everyone else. And then he remembers the Goblin's Head. He thinks, "
Someone is going to burn." Among other bigger-picture things, he commands the pub owner to remove the head, or else he'll burn down the building.
One of these is written with more heart than the other.
